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Question: when is a door not a door! Answer: when it is a piano. Such, at least, might be the contention of Mr Geoffrey Simon, sometime door manufacturer and now chairman of the world's most venerable firm of piano makers, John Broadwood & Sons Limited. If Simon's punch-line seems a trifle obscure, it may nonetheless be responsible for Broadwood's continued survival into its fourth unbroken century of Piano manufacture; while many of the company's more famous European rivals -- missing the joke -- have blithely tinkled their way into musical history.
That the name Broadwood may need introducing to non-musicologists among you at all is some indication of why Mr Simon needs to keep his sense of humour about him. If, in these post-Walkman days, it's hard to imagine, there was a time when the products of Simon's firm were, quite literally, at everyone's fingertips. When the eponymous Mr Broadwood -- inventor of such useful gizmos as separate bass and treble bridges and pedals instead of knee-levers -- died in 1815, he left a firm that was, in today's terms, worth millions and was the largest single employer in London. And it was not merely nicely brought-up gels who picked out Fur Elise on Mr Broadwood's pianos. Haydn and Chopin -- dazzled by the technical innovativeness of the firm's products -- were both devoted Broadwood fans. Nor was the firm's success based simply on its hi-tech tinkerings. Young Thomas Broadwood, at the keys from 1815, was also an early appreciator of the PR opportunity, dispatching a free piano to that dangerous Viennese avant gardiste, Ludwig van Beethoven, in 1817. Beethoven's subsequent product endorsement was fulsome: 'Ich werde es als einen Altar sehen' -- 'I shall look upon it as an altar.'
But such was very much not the case when Simon -- a keen amateur pianist ('Mine's a Steinway, actually,' blushes Broadwood's CEO) and ex-chairman of the Leaderflush door company -- bought John Broadwood & Sons with a consortium of like-minded plutocrats six years ago. 'The history of Broadwood had been the history of the English disease,' Simon avers. 'By the end of the 19th century, both the company and the family had become very wealthy, and they had ceased to be in the forefront...